Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Magic, zombies, the NH primary

Ah, the old dilemma. On the one hand, the Clintons represent the vilest D.C. shit imaginable – war, neo-liberalism, faux progressive politics that gets up in your ass and eats your intestine. And just as you are about to throw them out, they get attacked by – the even viler people. The media krewe of nitwits and combjobs who, over the last week, danced around like the high school students in Carrie, so happy that the wicked Hillary – she’s not a cheerleader girl at all! – was no longer in contention to be prom queen. The sheer overwhelming dreadful gross misogyny of it all made anybody with any heart want to strike them back, to slap those fat sleek faces until they were red. And so the 1998 white magic happens all over again. You can tell from who votes for the Clintons that it is a visceral class phenomena – that’s the sad part. It is the Blue collar belt that really always saves the Clintons bacon, not because the working class are stupid peckerwoods, but because they have a healthy animal instinct for the enemy. Although superficially they might nod along as the anchorman trills through his pack of lies, an instinct scratches. What is so sad is that, in these circumstances, the Clintons are really in the enemy camp. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. How fucked is that?

I was thinking, today, that someone really needs to start up the Adam Nagourney satire site again that went up in 2004 – this time, I think, as Jokeline, the popular comment thread name for Joe Klein – something that will throw as much shit as possible at the bastards. It is hard to think straight about politics when everything you hate is embodied every day on every channel and every newspaper – a smirking, brainless, sycophantic syndicate of toad eaters whose every gesture and remark is redolent of class privilege, ignorance, and such a remarkable lack of soul, such a vacuum of an interior life, such a cardboard sensibility for the normal drama of human existence that, that, that – I mean, it would shock a zombie how dead these people all are. All those stories about ‘natives’ fearing that photographs drain your soul are obviously scientifically right –for haven’t we watched TV drain the soul, down to the last drop, of those greedy talking heads that elbow their way in front of the camera? They exist solely to cretinize us – to make us stupider and stupider – on the magical principle of like drawing to like. As they draw the last bit of your soul out of fingertips, you can join them in a sort of vampire state of non-being.

So, somehow, that Clinton won – while I so ardently want Clinton to lose, to hear no more of Clinton, to see no more Clinton, somehow, somehow – this news made me smile.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.